A Heart That Beats
Sizzle—
A searing hiss rang out where skin met hot metal. I stared at the Duke's hand, my breath stopped in my throat.
Slowly, the Duke drew his hand back out of the fireplace.
It had gone black as coal, cracked open in places, and through the fissures showed raw red tissue. It was a sight that made the onlooker shudder.
"He's— he's lost his mind……"
The Viscountess got that far before clapping a hand over her own mouth. Adrian stood frozen where he was, eyes stretched wide.
Silence filled the room.
The Duke glanced once at his coal-black hand and said flatly, "Get up, Doctor."
It took me a long moment to realize he was talking to me. The sight of his hand had been so shocking that I had simply collapsed where I stood.
I tried to spring up as ordered, but my legs had gone slack and my body would not obey.
Merely looking at the Duke's hand — quite literally roasted over the coals — was enough to make my knees give out.
Trembling, I finally managed to speak. "Tr- treatment……"
"……Tsk."
The Duke clicked his tongue, as if my sluggish reaction irritated him. Then, without warning, he bent down toward me.
I thought he was hauling me to my feet — and instead my huddled body floated up into the air.
"……?"
Only when I found myself staring up at the Duke's face from just beneath his chin did I realize what had happened. He had gathered me up in both arms.
"Let's go."
The Duke strode for the door. Adrian blocked his way from behind.
"Lionel! If— if you leave me like this, what— what am I supposed to do!"
Up close, I watched the Duke's face twist savagely. A disgust that went beyond contempt poured out of every line of it.
"Adrian Dorset. You already know, don't you? Anything between you and Lionel ended the day you assaulted her."
"B- but you're a man too, Your Grace. You understand, don't you? Anyone would want to have the woman he loves. That's why I lost the weight, and…… and……"
"The moment you talk about 'having' someone, you've forfeited any claim. People are not objects. They cannot be owned — and I will never hand one over to the likes of you."
"……"
"Obsession like yours destroys you and the other person alike. So never come near Lionel again. If you catch my eye even one more time……"
The Duke dropped his voice in warning. Madness poured from his violet eyes and from his hand, blackened to charcoal.
"You'll end up just like this hand."
Adrian finally broke.
He looked down at himself, then collapsed to the floor and began to sob.
What are you crying for? What did you even do right?
Just as I was thinking that, a different obstruction planted itself in the Duke's path.
Viscount Dorset, who had somehow recovered his bluster.
"Your Grace! The farmers you lured away have cost me dearly. How do you intend to answer for that?"
The Duke parried with the very words he'd once used on me.
"All I did was offer the farmers the option of higher wages. Nothing more."
"What kind of sophistry is that? If I take this as evidence and bring you to trial, even Your Grace will not walk away unscathed!"
Emboldened by the Viscount's bravado, Lady Patricia rose to her feet as well. The Duke regarded them both with a face of perfect indifference.
"So poaching your farmers is a terrible crime, is it? Tell me, Viscount Dorset — have you ever once wondered where the money comes from, the money you borrow every night at those illegal gambling tables?"
At first the Viscount wore a baffled expression; then, as something dawned on him, his eyes went wide. The Duke turned to Kaylen and enunciated, loud and clear.
"Viscount Dorset has always borrowed on revolving credit. Since he claims kinship with our personal physician here, we ought to be all the more rigorous with the arithmetic. Calculate the interest down to the last coin and bill him for everything."
"My, my. So much to calculate — my competitive spirit is soaring."
Kaylen's eyes gleamed like a hunter who had spotted choice prey. From who knows where he'd hidden it, he produced an abacus from inside his coat.
"Viscount Dorset never once failed to choose the steepest rate — thirty percent a year, if you please. And he's been borrowing steadily for years now…… I'd say we should contact the slave traders early."
A scream tore out of the Viscountess. But no savior existed for them anymore.
The Duke gave them one frigid look, then turned his steps toward the door once more.
"Let's go."
Held in the Duke's arms, I was carried out of the mansion.
The married couple's shrieks, Kaylen's declaration of an astronomical sum, the sounds of Everlein subduing the flailing Lady Dorset — none of it reached me anymore.
Over the Duke's shoulder, I watched the mansion shrink into the distance.
This was the moment I finally bid farewell to the stalker who had made my life a misery.
The deepening night sky was unusually clear. Blasion walked in silence through the lingering winter air.
A long while had passed since they left the mansion, and still he showed no intention of setting Lionel down.
It was so comfortable she wanted to drift straight off into dreamland — but Lionel pulled herself together quickly.
"You can put me down now."
"No."
"I'm heavy……"
"You're not."
There was clearly no future for this conversation. Lionel closed her mouth and dropped her gaze.
What filled her vision was the hand, black as soot. She touched it with her fingertips.
"……Why did you do it?"
The hand, still clenched around the pocket watch, had gone hard as stone. Fourth-degree burns, certainly.
Blasion did not stop her from touching it.
She found herself wondering whether the burns were so severe the hand had lost all sensation, or whether he simply couldn't be bothered to stop her.
"I told you. Kkaeng-gap."
"Where in the world would you find an absurd kkaeng-gap like that?"
"They've seen with their own eyes exactly what kind of madman I am, so they'll never lay a hand on you again. That's the 'kkaeng-gap' I meant."
The Duke answered with his gaze still fixed ahead. His tone was neither emotional nor cold.
"And."
"……?"
"I wanted to apologize for your childhood. On behalf of adults everywhere."
Lionel was briefly at a loss. She had no idea how to answer that.
Only that, at those words, something in her chest had grown noticeably lighter.
"……I'm all right."
At her quiet reply, Blasion answered just as lightly.
"So am I. No matter how badly I'm hurt, I don't die."
Lionel remembered what he had said on the day she examined him.
"When my arm was cut off. When my leg was severed. My heart pounded hard as the flesh regenerated. I don't remember when my head was taken, but I imagine it raced then, too."
At the time, she had simply heard it and let it pass.
And until only moments ago, she had thought of him, as any doctor would, as nothing more than a patient with a remarkable condition.
But watching him actually be hurt had been agony to witness.
It was sad beyond all reason, and the ache of it cut deep.
Lionel could not answer at all. She only traced her fingers over Blasion's hand.
What do you do for a fourth-degree burn? Dressing? ……No. You'd need a skin graft. Does this world even have that kind of technology?
Lionel remembered a patient from long ago — a man hospitalized with terrible burns from an accident at work on a boat.
When she had debrided the burn as treatment, tearing the scab away by force, the man had wept from the pain.
If even Lionel, merely treating him, could feel that agony, she could scarcely imagine what the man himself had endured.
"Even if I can't die, the pain feels exactly the same."
He had said so himself, plainly — even an immortal feels pain.
Then how could he have plunged his hand into the fire without a moment's hesitation?
Perhaps for more than seven hundred years, he had bought his way through every moment of danger by sacrificing his own body.
Brainwashing himself into believing that because he could not die, the pain did not matter.
The thought was unbearable.
Tears that had overflowed the maximum tolerable dose spilled down her cheeks. And Blasion, seeing them, stopped dead in his tracks.
Once started, the tears showed no sign of stopping.
Through her blur-wrapped vision, she could see Blasion's face — utterly at a loss.
"Why are you crying?"
"Your hand— your hand……"
It needs treatment. I don't know what to do. I can't even begin to imagine how much it hurt.
The words crowding her throat never became sound; they spilled down with the tears instead.
Blasion exhaled a light sigh. He answered as though it were truly nothing.
"Forgotten already? I don't die. Not to a severed neck, not to burning hands. Everything returns to normal in the end……"
"Even if— even if you can't die……!"
Lionel seized the Duke's hand. Out of all the words in the world, she dragged out the only ones she could find.
"……There's no rule that says you have to hurt like this."
At those unforeseen words, Blasion went still.
And then, with staggering force——
—Thump.
His heart beat.